People wondered about that trio of adventurers, two high-spirited women, Judy and Jinx, and a vigorous man, Don, their lot thrown in together months at a time with a bunch of kids impervious to cold and storm tumbling around their ankles. Their faces filled the projection screen. Jinx had the strained look of a woman who was told what she had to tolerate. Don had a crazy adventurer twist to his grin and commanding eyes brooking no contradiction. He kept Te Ata going with all its backup systems in order and spare parts labelled and stored within handy reach.
Now he was dead and Te Ata sold.
The Redlynch–Kovačić house, where Judy, Wes and Chippy stayed in Sydney, for as long as they liked or were able to, was made of glass and timber cubes on five levels, launching off a quiet street and down a cliff to a bush gully behind, where there were scrub turkeys, ringtail possums and, so Ken and Dijana swore, quolls, the rare marsupial cat. The house was a boasted eight-minute drive on the freeway and over the Bridge to the centre of Sydney if traffic allowed. Dijana had done a portrait of Ken for his fiftieth birthday, a fine silvered head against a background of classic yachts with a grouping of bush flowers like a hippy shirt collar. The portrait guided the way to the master bedroom, with a feature light picking out Ken’s prosperous flesh tones.
Chippy jumped down the steep sandstone outside steps two at a time. At the bottom level two bedrooms and a bathroom looked out into the gully. Streetlights on the other side of the gully splintered like stars through the vegetation. There was a walk around winding streets down to a marine engineer’s works, a slipway, a jetty and moorings. Ken had a new yacht there, the Jack London, and wanted Judy to take the helm in a harbour race. Wes had, with Chippy aboard, and won. Judy doubted she was that sort of mariner but said she would come for a sail when she got the chance between engagements. What she had in mind was a boat of another sort for a thrust into world opinion. It was why more fund-raising was needed, only she didn’t want to say it and kept the thought to herself as it grew.
Ken declared to Dijana over the washing up that Judy was a bloody wonder. A force of unbounded enthusiasms, one after another. An observing naturalist had evolved in her, and such were needed. She had a theoretical synthesis equal to her vast experience of Antarctic bird and sea life. In sum, in Ken’s eyes, she was the daughter of her campaigning mother. And now in a synthesis of opportunities something else was getting born in her. He could sense it. Whatever it was, Ken was on hand to take credit.
‘I could eat that little Chippy alive,’ said Dijana.
Judy dressed Chippy in khaki long trousers, a checked shirt and bow tie for a Friday night party. She put product in his hair. Dijana could not take her eyes off him. Nor could any woman with the mothering instinct rampant or not.
Harold and Margaret Wells arrived. Everyone in that circle was more prosperous, now, more thoroughly pleased with themselves concerning the rung they’d arrived at on the tricky integrity ladder. They were helped a bit more in handling it, conscience-wise, by the perspective of a few years on from inadequate Education Department pay packets.
‘What’s your daddy up to?’ Tina Stones asked Chippy, trying to drag him onto her knee. He resisted. ‘Dad’s building Noah’s Ark,’ he said.
‘Don’t be cheeky,’ said Tina.
Only Margaret out of all these people still looked fearful, fidgety and excited, more strained than she ever was if that was possible, but rather more beautiful too than just wildly pretty as everyone said. Chippy ran to her, escaping Tina’s clutches. She knelt, straightened his tie, kissed him on the cheek and flicked her capable fashion fingers through his reddish, Wes-like thatch. Harold from a doorway watched her with pride and uncertainty. They still had an air of a couple about to spring apart. Judy waited for a return of the old breathy honesty, a secret to restore Margaret to her, as when all this started. Otherwise old friendships, connections, all the threads of the heart frayed.
‘Champagne!’ Ken roared. He had boxes of dozens shipped from France, the French forgiven, finally, through popping of Brut Réserve corks over the balcony into the bush. In the last couple of years French atomic tests had gone underground, slackened off in the face of determined opposition. The world, was it becoming a better place? There was reason to think so, except for melting ice caps. Nationally Labor governed as of right. The PM was a larrikin business supporter and owned a pig farm. Ken and Dijana revelled in business success, enjoying what they had garnered through conscience, as doing good in the world was what Boatwear Bushgear sold itself to the buying public on, and Ken had his school, Kanimbla Clifftop College, to balance residual greed with utter idealism. Harold and Margaret, their spinners of gold, moved around the room like poor relations from the factory floor kicked upstairs. In fact, they were equal partners and drove a new Mercedes-Benz.
Margaret did come close with a whispered, and quite correct, assumption that night: ‘Judy, I hear you’ve lost someone close. I’m sorry.’
There were many ways Don Fawkner could have died but he chose the most unlikely, said Judy in her slide talks. Don had let an infection get into his lungs, and chose not telling Jinx so as not to bother her about the pain between his ribs that came on for a day and a half, so she would not have to break out the antibiotics.
Consistent with Antarctic stoicism, he died the next night from a catastrophic pneumothorax. At his memorial service, in Auckland, there were slides of Don mountaineering, skiing before an avalanche, cave diving, and jumping from a plane, his limbs spread like an echinoderm or starfish’s radial symmetry.
When Judy’s time came to remember Don in that Anglican Cathedral service, she described her first experience coming in from a swell off South Georgia and meeting the pack ice. ‘The horizon was all lumpy, and the sea and swell were damped down considerably. It was an exciting moment.’ It did not sound all that eloquent but Judy thought or hoped it would give the sense of Don, how whatever the situation was that came before, all through and afterwards there was calm.
What Judy left out was that Don had failings too. She regretted she had not thought that side of him through enough, and spoken about it honestly, at the service. Don illustrated the sort of man who learnt from his mistakes, or anyway as best he could stoked them back in to feed the volcano for a better day. Judy watched Wes for signs of that conclusively. He never made a wrong step either, although she still waited. To love someone, marry them and raise a loved child together in remarkable circumstances did not mean you had to drop the idea that a moment’s misjudgement was not just around the corner. At the party at Ken and Dijana’s the two of them, Wes and Judy, sat outside in opposite cane chairs; she took her shoes off and put her feet in his lap. ‘So, here we are,’ they chimed.
Yes, no argument, this was the eighth year for Chippy as they had long agreed, and no more postponement of objectives. So Judy told Wes her plan, and stopped talking if anyone came near. She wanted to sail around the world, she said, non-stop and alone the wrong way round. Wes drew a controlled breath, listening. She didn’t say it was to give herself another platform to talk from, to win the world’s ear. It was and it wasn’t. It just felt like a continuation of her pace through life, in which she always seemed to find the most unexpected revelations of herself by doing the opposite of what was ordinary. ‘Well, what do you think?’ she said. ‘It’s big, isn’t it … So bloody big I can’t let it go.’
Wes fought the idea in his brain as hard as he had ever fought anything in his physical life. But he listened without interruption, mentally stunned, massaging Judy’s toes and reaching round her ankles, feeling the sinews in her calf muscles firm and complete as could be as he relaxed them. That he could never have her the way he liked her without sensing she was pulling against him was the way they had finally sorted out themselves. As a link in that space between them, link as in coupling, joint or knot, they had Chippy.
In her bunk aboard Te Ata with Don on watch, Judy had slept her off-watch hours with Chippy in his hammock swinging above her, Jinx i
n the skipper’s quarters catching her sleep, and the Behr-Fawkner girls in their bunk space past the mast step where they slept either side of a passageway, enabling them to reach out and touch each other’s fingertips. Kay Cottee said in her book that she broke up with her boyfriend of six years while soloing past Cape Horn, but did not tell him. Judy felt she’d married Wes in the same way but opposite – coming back the other way into their fuller life, having wormed Wes back into her heart in a half-dream of forgiveness through her first voyage on Te Ata and feeling a sense of him smooth over her in all sorts of situations as she came into and out of awareness. Emotional safety was the payback for his rotten skippering. That he would have to work out what that meant was always between the lines between the two of them since Judy had said yes when he faxed her marry me, and in this proposition or plan she had he would have to work out his role.
A story Judy told hung off a clutch of slides of Don Fawkner with ice in his eyebrows, Don back before Jinx or any of them came into his life, when he was still a teenager. In her mind Judy held the story up against her cowardice, before any of this sailing evolution, when she’d challenged herself to sleep out alone on the banks of the Darling River and failed and crept into the back seat of her mother’s Mini when she got cold and nervous and locked the doors. That moment was really quite possibly when her sailing philosophy was born. There was no fear that could not be overcome if you had an aim that was greater than it. She blinked awake, looked into Wes’s steady eyes looking at her while the party carried on indifferently around them. Heavens. Yes. He was with her.
Somebody influential had said to Don Fawkner when he was young, maybe it was a teacher, that it was easy to see the faults in the world and easy to point them out, but not so easy to find a solution, and even more difficult to think of something one could do, personally to help a situation. In a centreboard twenty-footer of plywood design that teenaged Don had built in his parents’ driveway and trailered to the South Island behind a friend’s old car, he’d sailed south to the Bounty Islands on the edge of the sub-Antarctic with that plucky girl.
The question Don asked as a teenager was the same one he was still chasing when he died, namely what sort of effect was the world’s consumption of limited resources having on its birdlife as indexed in the Antarctic.
After a week’s sail into the Southern Ocean the trailer-sailer had stood off Bounty Island in the direction of the Antarctic Circle, and Don landed the girl on the rocks. A gale was building and Don signalled that he would move the yacht farther out, clear of the low, rough stony islet bereft of anchorages, but return before dark to collect her. He did not return, it was blowing too hard. The girl lost sight of the yacht, so she slept ashore between boulders under a knobbly knitted Fair Isle sweater in bitter conditions. In the morning Don was sighted, not far off shore, and all was well. They sailed back to Christchurch, a week’s sail, to a howling reception of police, parents and reporters.
The weekend before Wes flew back to Perth to carry on a project with Brian Papasidero, boys and girls from Kanimbla Clifftop College came down to Sydney and crewed Ken’s yacht, the Jack London, virtually a sail training vessel for the purpose, a fifty-three-foot sloop used for character building.
Chippy knew more than the whole lot of them about what to do around deck jobs and his footing was nimble out through the Heads, pitching and rolling, when the rest of the kids clipped onto safety lines and looked afraid. A boat in the racing fleet passing them reported at the yacht club bar that Ken kept an ape aboard as no human being was capable of doing what they saw, a shadow running along the port side and flexing halfway up the mast during a tight reach. While Wes took the wheel Margaret Wells crawled after the kids fore and aft with a measuring tape, scissors and a notebook, making adjustments to Junior Boatwear Bushgear prototypes. The company thrived on the Gore-Tex revolution – easy-drying, comfortable, breathing synthetic fabric that rustled like banknotes when pulled on.
Wes let go the wheel and Judy had no choice but to take over on the crowded harbour. Ken snapped to interested attention as they cleaved through the racing fleet, Wes calling out possible conflicts where Judy couldn’t see back over her shoulder or low down, under the bow. It was a measured conversation between the two of them, the way they handled that yacht, no yelling. They’d honed their emotional experience with each other to this fine balance. Ye gods, thought Ken, this is the same Wes who blew his stack and wrecked the Rattler. The pair of them had grown up, matured, way past any level Ken had stabilised in any of his three marriages. It shamed his mentoring boasts around them – now they taught him. Look at Judy so professionally quick. Her ship’s master’s papers were in order after hard study and bitter resistance by Chilean authorities. She had skippered Te Ata, near the end, in rotation with Don. She had given her talks, in passable Spanish, at the Chilean naval college, where cadets threw their caps in the air, and she posed with a cap on top of her curls in a press photograph taken on the deck of the national sail training ship. And all that time on this side of the world Wes had kept his patience. It was their payoff, Ken accurately observed, which was all he needed to know about what was ahead of them.
That spring Tina Stones wrote up the WA wildflower season in the vocabulary of biodiversity. There was nowhere else on the planet like the region botanically, she banged on to her editor getting the assignment. She drove north from Perth to look at the wildflowers just starting to spread their display farther south in a hardy crescendo. In the back of her mind and in the forefront of her cunning was an investigative feature on Wes, and his ugly little soulmate Brian Papasidero, who were up to something on the basis of what Chippy said to her, like a child in a fairytale: ‘Dad’s building Noah’s Ark.’
‘What on earth do you mean, Chips?’
Chippy had already said too much, and shrank. No significa nada.
So Tina’s curiosity was roused spectacularly. When you are looking for something and it drives you mad because you cannot find it, Tina told colleagues in the journalism classes she ran, you are usually standing right on top of it.
At a roadhouse away out towards a place where the flowers were worked details in a vast tapestry, she stared at a man getting out of a truck and filling it at the diesel pumps. What sort of bloke are you, she wondered. The outback never stopped throwing up specimens. The bloke looked like a New Guinea native, smeared with white clay or dust from spilt bags of cement on the carrying tray. All he wore was a pair of shorts, tight up into his crotch like Crocodile Dundee’s hotpants. Bare-footed, he balanced on one leg, then the other, picking bindi-eyes out from his soles. His hair was caked with cement dust worked into beads by sweat. Tina lay her camera across the dashboard and took a photo, thinking it might make a mark in the annual press shots of the year at the Walkley Awards, or could be used in a book. What a country anyhow.
Then an older man came out of the roadhouse carrying a slab of beer, heaved it on the back on the bags of cement with some difficulty and went around to the passenger-side door, calling out in a loud voice, ‘To horse, to horse, you riders of the purple sage,’ and banged the cabin roof with the flat of his hand, and off they went.
Back in Sydney, Tina wrote up the wildflowers. Her picture editor said, ‘Throw those other shots out.’
That figure was Wes, and the older man Brian Papasidero, two rough nuts unrecognisable out of their party wear. North of Perth, then more north and north, a fair way up the coast to a fringing reef on an abandoned sheep station edging the Indian Ocean tideline, was a pegged-out square of levelled ground. They got stuck in, laying a concrete surface. Telecom workers laid a phone cable. Power came from a diesel generator. The slab was for the floor of a shed big enough to hold an immense catamaran and the equipment needed to work on one. Certainly you would have to be Noah to expect a flood up there but Brian looked every inch the boiled frog patriarch and Wes one of Noah’s lean, ambitious sons, destined to sire nations and live six hundred years.
The concreting job bet
ween land and sea kept Wes fit and steadied his mind and kept Brian happy about who he was, a name on the WA rich list but a man of the dirt from somewhere. Back in the city there were too many people asking questions of two men at opposite ends of the age spectrum, singled out for heroic tries on water. A sail to Heard Island and back had made them known in the West as a duo of loony adventurers, the question being: what would they do next? If you wanted to do something original and meant it, tell no-one.
Wes and Brian had been to India and commissioned the craft, hulls double-diagonal plywood, recycled teak used where appropriate for structural strength, and laminated backward-tapering mast profiles rounded to the needs of a particular, revolutionary sail plan. Here on the slab she was to be internally fitted out and have her rigging reinforced for extreme Southern Ocean weather. The Nautilus was sixty-five feet long with a thirty-one foot beam, four-foot draft, epoxy-glassed, white-painted hulls, her twin prows painted red and black with the eyes of a sea creature sprung from legend. She was being sailed down from India by a handover crew and expected on a king tide within weeks. Papasidero wanted a record-breaking, easterly-driving, high-speed circumnavigation machine, without a nail or steel part, to scorch the record books green, balancing out a lifetime of digging up dirt. He went on assuaging the internal grief he was only ever able to cope with externally, since the loss of his wife. Wes contributed lost traditions, resuscitated through hand-eye co-ordination and what he’d learned in Macassar and Mumbai. Plus he laid on a purposeful dream as correction to fragmentation of purpose quite as matched to Brian’s as any one of his own.
A Sea-Chase Page 21